I don't know that I have the answer for you but mine Cinnamon install on two machines only runs about 432mb ram usage with idle desktop. It was higher when I had the weather applet running, but uninstalled that. so my guess is the weather app maybe causing the useage, but nothing definitive try shutting it off and see.

System Monitor on my Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon system shows a memory usage of 218 MB at startup, but I have a tweaked system running only necessary programs. I ran Linux Mint 14 Mate on a virtual machine and it used 73 MB less, but it had only the originally installed programs. You posted system information from running the Top command after 37 minutes of operation. From the information above I figured there is about 562 MB of memory unaccounted for. However the Top command only lists the most CPU intensive tasks running. To see the other tasks running, start System Monitor and while you're viewing the Processes tab window, click View in the menu and change the selection from "My Processes" to "All Processes". Look over this list and add up the memory usage of all the other tasks. Have you checked the programs listed under Startup Applications? I have 3 out of 8 programs checked to run in my Startup Applications. If I enable all 8 to run, then I only see a 17 MB increase in memory use but you could have other high memory consuming programs installed that run at startup. By the way, your firefox program uses a lot more memory than mine, although you may have a lot more add-ons installed and an older version. You list 6.2% memory use of 246 MB and 15.9% CPU and I list 4.8% memory use of 93 MB and only 2% CPU but I only have 2 GB of memory installed.

Yup! 15.9% Firefox cpu use seems a bit high to me. I seldom go above 2%. After a fresh boot of Mint 14 KDE 4.10, I use 550 MB ram for app data, and after a couple days it grows to around 1 GB. Doesn't matter, I have 8 GB to work with. By chance did you go to your Firefox settings, edit, preferences, advanced tab and change the cache management value? Mine started with a default value of 1 GB. I dropped that to 25 MB. I don't need that stuff being stored. Beyond that, I really don't know. I have done so many little things to my system, such as tweeking UEFI BIOS settings including overclocking, turning off unnecessary services etc.

Orbmiser> Couple comments on your first post FWIW. Your top values are missing some of memory usages because you have not set it to list top memory - to do that press M (capital). I prefer Htop myself and don't trust conkys. Since you use 64 bits you might expect some high ram use - I don't use 64 because of the high ram and 32 bit libs have to be installed anyway.

kc1di wrote:I just check this machine on mate and it uses 512mb on a fairly idle desktop.. That actually surprised me thought mate would have less ram useage

That does seem high. Right now with FF having 8 tabs + GIMP open with 2 images loaded + terminal and the usual startup stuff - I am using 378/2012MB. That's why I chose Xfce with Enlightenment - beauty, function, speed and some memory left over.

Hmmm well on KDE now anyways and waiting for Cinnamon 15 to do a clean install and go from there.Tho conky just reads the mem? and reports and changes depending on desktop loaded. Not concerned of absolute accuracy tho same conky reports difference in different distro's. And shows what system monitor reports.

Just strange why mine is that high when others are not. Don't know if it has to do with open video driver or other.And system processes don't seem to report root processes? as don't see them in process tree..

Orbmiser wrote:Just strange why mine is that high when others are not. .

From what I've read from tests comparing memory usage on 32 bit vs 64 bit systems, there is about a 100 MB difference at startup, which accounts for at least 25% of the memory discrepancy you're seeing. I was going to suggest if you wanted to pursue this matter, to post a complete memory usage list of all programs at startup so a line by line comparison could be done. Additionally you could have run Cinnamon in a virtual machine to see how much of a difference shows up after initial installation. However, I see that you're now doing a clean install of Cinnamon 15?